1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to reconfigurable computing systems. More particularly, embodiments of the invention involve a reconfigurable computing system that employs intelligent computing agents for optimizing system performance by autonomously and strategically assigning computing tasks to a pool of computing resources.
2. Description of Related Art
Many time-critical computing applications are best served by a heterogeneous pool of computing hardware resources, including general purpose resources and specialized resources adapted to perform one or more particular computing tasks in an efficient manner. In certain military applications, for example, data must be gathered and analyzed in a manner that allows for a timely and appropriate response to the gathered data. Analyzing the gathered data may be very rigorous and time-consuming if it involves, for example, signal processing or similar math-intensive tasks. It will be appreciated that this challenge is further complicated if the nature of the computing tasks change over time. Using dedicated hardware resources, such as specialized signal processing hardware, can substantially reduce the amount of time required to perform such tasks by completing the tasks in a timely manner and freeing general purpose resources, such as general purpose processors, to perform less rigorous algorithms or manage the flow of tasks through the system.
Unfortunately, use of pre-allocated, independent collections of specialized hardware resources can be inefficient in cost, power, and size because of the dynamic nature of the requirements of some applications. A pool of hardware resources that are well adapted to efficiently perform a first set of tasks may not be well adapted to perform a second set of tasks. Although one or more human operators could, in principle, manage the resources to help overcome this problem, using a human operator is costly, results in operator overload, and is only useful in slower dynamic situations. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved computing system that does not suffer from the problems and limitations of the prior art.